MITPressLog

Today's Eye Candy comes from The Fate of Greenland: Lessons from Abrupt Climate Change, by Philip Conkling, Richard Alley, Wallace Broecker, and George Denton; photographs by Gary Comer. The Fate of Greenland features 77 color photos and is the first climate science trade book to focus on Greenland, the world’s largest island. Because of global warming, Greenland’s ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice are melting, as evidenced by dramatic photographs made available a couple of years ago that have been the focus of news stories. This dramatically illustrated book describes how Greenland’s changing ice will affect the rest of the world. 

 

Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

A meltwater lake on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. Ice flow over bedrock bumps creates local low spots on the surface where water pools. These lakes sometimes wedge open crevasses, draining suddenly and spectacularly through the ice to the bottom and then out to the edge of the ice. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

A debris-laden iceberg in Scoresby Sound. Glaciers carry material that falls on them, or that they pick up from beneath them or bulldoze in front. This material is eventually left in ridges called moraines, or spread across the landscape or dropped from icebergs to the sea floor. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

Large iceberg calved from Daugaard-Jensen Glacier, Northwest Fjord in Scoresby Sound. (Photo by Philip Conkling)

 

 

 

 

Statue of Leif overlooking his father's, Erik the Red's, farm Brattahlid. (Photo by Philip Conkling)

 

 

 

 

Except in especially cold places where ice is frozen to the rocks beneath, glaciers usually erode the landscape more rapidly than rivers or wind. Valleys that are "U-shaped" in cross-section are characteristic of erosion by glaciers, such as the classic Qinguadalen valley that drains into the head of Taserssuaq Lake and was full of ice during the ice age. Note the delta and melt water plume built by sediment carried in the stream fed by numerous alpine cirque glaciers. (Photo by Gary Comer)

 

 

 

 

George Denton (right) and Bjorn Andersen study the geomorphology of a raised delta colonized by tundra plants, including bearberry leaves that show this striking red color in autumn, in Milne Land along the northern flank of Scoresby Sound. (Photo by Richard Alley)

 

 

How to Read the Landscape

Last week, MIT Press staff told us which titles they'd suggest as gifts.This week, Daniel Bouchard, a member of the MIT Press Journals Division, recommends A Landscape History of New England, edited by  Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd:

 

A Landscape History of New England  is an ideal primer for answering (and providing) a lot of questions about the common and uncommon landscapes all around as you travel through New England. It’s a resource, serving as a decoder of landscapes. Drawing on a long and scholarly tradition, it teaches you how to read the landscape. As an interested reader of many of the books cited throughout these 21 articles (by 23 authors), and a fan of many of those earlier authors (John Brinckerhoff Jackson, William Cronon, John Stilgoe, D.W. Meinig, and others, not least of whom, Thoreau), I found this collection a significant addition and worthy contribution to the literature. Now, as a pleasantly burdensome bonus, I have two handfuls of new (to me) authors on whom to keep an eye.

But what good is that to you? Well, imagine you and a friend are driving separate cars north out of New York City. You’ve got some time on your hands, opted for a road trip, and decided to “see” New England. It’s not the biggest territory in the States, but it’s still a lot of ground to cover. You pass over bridges, pause thru toll booths, and lean the wheel into the lanes under the big green highway signs boldly declaring “New England.”

Then you do something unique. Your car and the other car part ways to investigate different routes. You will meet up again somewhere way up north, let’s say at a diner in Brewer, Maine, in ten days. There, over lobster rolls and ale, you will discuss what you saw and compare notes. One car will “take a left” off Interstate 95 at New Haven and head north into Vermont. The other will continue along the coast up through Rhode Island, Boston and New Hampshire.

Is it a scavenger hunt for the eyes? What do we expect them to see? When they see the attractive old buildings in a town center painted white will they know those buildings are painted “a starker white paint than had been available to earlier generations”? (31) There is a lot to be gained by understanding such a thing. There’s a lot of history to consider beyond any plaques mounted nearby, and such plaques may indeed be more part of that history than they are a guide to it. Take the town Common: it may look postcard nice when our travelers pull up, but chances are good it was once held with the regard of any uncared for empty lot with junk on it, deep ruts from vehicles and stray animals. That condition wouldn’t be acceptable today, of course, and you can find out why it used to be.

Think about what you would see if you bought someone a coffee-table book “about” New England, one of those over-size picture books (which A Landscape History of New England definitely is not). No doubt, in that book there would be a lot of superb photographs of historic town centers with colonial and Federal style housing on streets radiating out from rising white steeples. In the rural section there would be old farmhouses and barns and piles of pumpkins gathered in the fall. On the coast there would be pictures of beaches and waterfronts, and fishermen on small boats coming in or out of the harbor. There may be pictures of quahogs, oysters or lobsters. There are few better pictorial representations of New England than a close up of a bivalve or crustacean in the hands of an old salt donning rubber overalls. For representations of the city you would see some nicely framed vantages of historic houses like those on Beacon Hill (Boston) or College Hill (Providence) and an aerial shot of Faneuil Hall and Fenway Park and so on. And in the mountains some photos of the colorful fall foliage with more farms and attractive town centers nearby. But what do any of the pictures tell us about New England? They only show us what we already know is there. And it is pretty.  

In both cars the challenge for the groups (yes, I’ve populated the front and back seats of the two cars—it’s more fun) is the same as they speed across the highways. They have the option to take any exit and explore whatever towns they come into and also the back roads between the towns as well as the large and small cities. The car along the coast exits and heads toward the water. They want to see some little town where there are fishing boats and a decent seafood restaurant. They will get out and take some pictures before they eat. The other car off-ramps in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. They admire the farms and meadows they pass and soon they come to the white steeple of a church and an old town hall and then the car pulls over by a small bridge where a handsome brick factory sits next to the water. The travelers get out, stretch, take some pictures and then go find something to eat.

If we have been in New England we have an idea of what others may expect to see in it. Now the questions turn to what can we understand about what we see all around us on the trip. The roads everywhere are lined with old stone walls. Sometimes, from the highway, you see the same stone walls rising up off the roadside and heading up over a hill covered with trees. Who put them there? The harbor atmosphere in a seaside tourist destination tries hard to evoke an earlier time. Why? Is the past more authentic? It is common knowledge that New England is the place to view autumn foliage but were those beautiful autumn views always highly valued?

Anyone can give you a dozen good reasons to visit Cape Cod. With this book you begin to see it from the eyes of a geographer. People on the Cape work hard to make a living from the land and sea. They always have. But after the First World War the economy shifted from working the land’s natural resources to working the industries and services that comprise a tourist seasonal-resident destination. The Cumbler chapter traces those changes with a cautionary note on the Cape as a “fragile ecosystem.”

So as our travelers compare notes they realize that they can now list dozens of towns all founded in the mid-18^th century, from each state. Some look like they are still in that time period with sprawling old farms and pastoral views—beautiful. Some simply look ravaged. Some look like revived mill towns, with humming, retro-fitted brick factories. And some mill towns look simply dilapidated with no help on the way. Some towns, after 250 years, appear to be just two highways crossing by a gas station and some, maybe a town or two away, are congested with upscale housing and fancy shops. Are the current economic winners also the past economic losers, thus preserving the things now highly valued as “New England”? Read the Wood chapter to find out.

This book informs like a startling tour guide. What it can’t answer directly it points you in the direction to find out for yourself. Did you know that three-quarters of New England was deforested by the mid-19^th century? Today it is three-quarters forested, and it reverted to its forested state “even more rapidly” than it was stripped (41). A Landscape History of New England offers everything our travelers need except restaurant recommendations. It offers everything they need to really see, the forest and the trees. After reading this book your trip on the Mass. Pike or the Merritt Parkway or the Spaulding Turnpike or through the Northeast Kingdom or the road to Mount Katahdin (after you finish your ice cream in the Bremen diner) or on what Jack Kerouac called “one long red line called Route 6” from the tip of Cape Cod to where it leaves Connecticut west of Danbury will never be the same. 

 

Failed Farms to Fall Foliage

Fall is upon us, bringing with it gorgeous landscapes that mesmerize tourists and native New Englanders alike. Yet, fall foliage was not always something that people flocked from both near and far to appreciate; in fact, Kent C. Ryden writes in A Landscape History of New England (edited by Blake Harrison and Richard Judd), “New England’s fall colors seemed to be a secret…[people] paid little heed to fall foliage because it served no aesthetic or imaginative purpose for them, so it remained simply a part of the backdrop to their everyday lives.” How did New England’s vibrant fall colors transition from ignored to revered? The following excerpt from A Landscape History of New England explains.

From earliest European settlement until well into the nineteenth century, the primary story of the New England landscape was the conversion of wooded space into agricultural space. Given the economic calculus of the times and the set of understandings guiding the minds and hands of New Englanders, “forest” meant “potential farm,” which meant that trees existed to be cleared for fields and fuel, with some left standing as woodlots to provide farms and villages with continued timber resources. In a remarkably short time, as much of the New England landscape as was practicable was converted to farms, with the line of agricultural settlement reaching north into Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont by the 1790s. By the middle of the nineteenth century, according to some estimates, three-quarters of New England had been deforested, primarily for agricultural use.

Today, however, those same estimates gauge the region as three-quarters forested. What had been a massive landscape conversion over the course of three centuries has reverted even more rapidly to some semblance of its former self in only half the time. It is not a matter of the original ground cover reasserting itself; indeed, the ecological composition of New England forests today is largely a result of human action. To summarize a long and complex story: once the American Northeast was connected to the agricultural lands of the Midwest by first the Erie Canal (finished in 1825) and then by railroads (completed in the 1840s), New England agriculture became a more difficult economic concern. It is not that New England farms failed absolutely; rather, given their comparatively thin soils, their shorter growing seasons compared to other states, and the impracticability of new farm machinery on many smaller holdings, they were at an economic disadvantage in competition with the influx of cheaper foodstuffs arriving daily from other parts of the country. Some farmers—particularly those in the more hardscrabble hill farms of northern New England—abandoned their lands…much of the New England landscape was allowed to revert to forest…

Far from being heartened by the return of trees on the played-out farms, many early commentators looked at the New England landscape according to the old calculus of productivity. From their perspective, New England was a failed region…

By the early twentieth century, however, we also begin to see a change in how that landscape is perceived, a change that reflects a larger regional and national evolution in the cultural meanings of natural places. Just as changing nature-culture relations have molded the physical landscape of New England, so have changing cultural ideologies regarding nature altered the perceived significance of the landscape. Basically, this change amounted to thinking of forests not as “failed farms” but as “foliage,” an altogether different category of landscape. A new one, too: the popularity of, and regional pride in, colorful leafy hillsides is very much a twentieth-century development…[allowing fall foliage to become] not only a New England regional symbol but the main focus of many an autumnal bus trip along the region’s back roads.

 

Calling All Coffee Addicts

Today is National Coffee Day--here's an excerpt from Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America, edited by Christopher Bacon et. al, to go along with your cup of afternoon joe.

Brazil and Vietnam have reshaped the world's coffee supply. Before 1990, Vietnam was barely a statistical blip in the coffee world, producing just 1.5 million bags. Its agricultural economy was opened to the world market during the 1990s, with the government providing irrigated land and subsidies to encourage resettlement by farmers into coffee production. By 2000, it had become the second-largest producer in the world, with 15 million bags to its name, largely produced on small farm holdings. Brazil, on the other hand, is not a newcomer: it has long been the world's largest producer, but production has recently been boosted by changes in how and where coffee is grown. Increased mechanization, intense production methods, and a geographical shift away from the traditional, frost-prone growing areas have all increased yields.

Though production levels in Brazil will rise and fall over time, the country's ability to produce profitably even at low world prices renders growers in many other regions powerless in the market. As a result of Brazil's unprecendented capacity and efficiency, the impact for traditional coffee-producing countries is serious. Patrick Installe, the Managing Director of Efico, a green coffee trader, elaborates: "To give you an idea of the difference, in some areas of Guatemala, it could take over 1.000 people working one day each to fill the equivalent of one container of 275 bags, each bag weighing 69 [kilograms]. In the Brazilian cerrado, you need five people and a mechanical harvester for two or three days to fill a container. One drives, and the others pick. How can Central American family farms compete against that?" (Installe 2002)

Making an Impact

Thomson Reuters released its most recent Journal Citation Reports (JCR) and impact factor rankings in late June. Many of the journals from the MIT Press did well this year, with several of them seeing a notable increase in impact factor. The title to steal the show was the quarterly Global Environmental Politics (GEP). The journal’s impact factor jumped nearly a full point from 1.382 to 2.231 in 2010. The JCR ranks GEP ninth in environmental studies and fifth out of 139 journals in political science.

GEP was founded in 2000 and explores the relationship between global political forces and environmental change. The MIT Press has watched this nascent journal grow its subscriber base continuously over the years and come to be a cornerstone for the burgeoning field of environmental science. It has quickly distinguished itself as an important home for seminal work and its influence both within and outside of academia has grown. Its authors hail from a variety of disciplines: political science, international relations, sociology, history, human geography, public policy, science and technology studies, environmental ethics, law economics, and environmental science. GEP editors, Jennifer Clapp and Matthew Paterson, attribute much of the success of the journal to this interdisciplinary authorship, stating that the “strong community of top-rate scholars both follow and contribute to the growing global conversation” on international environmental issues. Rather than simply gleaning select pieces from the field, Clapp and Paterson, along with GEP’s associate editors, consistently provide thorough and thoughtful feedback to authors, a process they believe creates high-quality articles that are both conceptually profound and topically relevant.

As scholars delve further into the complexities of environmental issues, it becomes clear that these stresses touch aspects of our lives previously unacknowledged. Say Clapp and Paterson, "the journal's success reflects the increasing recognition that environmental problems cannot be understood just as economic or technical questions, but raise profound questions about politics - of authority, power, justice". The MIT Press looks forward to watching GEP gather more questions, research and reflections within its pages, and we hope readers (both casual and professional) continue to find the substantive discourse they’ve come to expect from the journal.  

 

Uncle Sam's Reading List

To get into the Independence Day 2011 spirit, we picked 11 books with “America” or “American” in the title to kick off the holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!

  Inventing American History by William Hogeland

American public history—in magazines and books, television documentaries, and museums—tends to celebrate its subject at all costs, even to the point of denial and distortion. This does us a great disservice, argues William Hogeland.  Looking at details glossed over in three examples of public history—the Alexander Hamilton revival, tributes to Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley, and the Constitution Center in Philadelphia—Hogeland considers what we lose when history is written to conform to political aims.

Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil

America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail. He finds profound differences.

 

After America’s Midlife Crisis by Michael Gecan

Gecan reveals an urban landscape in which careerism, nepotism, and greed are the principal movers in policy, while the institutions that preserve and advance communities—schools, churches, affordable housing, recreational opportunities—have fallen prey to the indifference of pols and developers and the shortsightedness of technocrats and shows how local experiments can create vibrant institutions that truly serve their constituents.

 

America's Food : What You Don't Know About What You Eat by Harvey Blatt

We don't think much about how food gets to our tables, or what had to happen to fill our supermarket's produce section with perfectly round red tomatoes and its meat counter with slabs of beautifully marbled steak. We don't realize that the meat in one fast-food hamburger may come from many different cattle raised in several different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In America's Food, Harvey Blatt gives us the specifics.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea

The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth.

 

America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina.  Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated.

 

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

The surge of inequality in income and wealth in the United States over the past twenty-five years has reversed the steady progress toward greater equality that had been underway throughout most of the twentieth century. This economic development has defied historical patterns and surprised many economists, producing vigorous debate. Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? examines the ways in which human capital policies can address this important problem.

 

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings by David E. Nye

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.

 

Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology by Kenneth A. Breisch

One natural outcome of the educational reform movement of the 1840s was the growth of the American public library. Some 450 public libraries were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The most important and influential architect of the era who built libraries was Henry Hobson Richardson, perhaps best known for his design of Boston's Trinity Church.

 

What Does the World Want from America?: International Perspectives on US Foreign Policy edited by Alexander T. J. Lennon

In What Does the World Want from America?, writers from twelve countries or regions (Brazil, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa) answer the question, "In an ideal world, what role would you want the United States to perform with your country and region?" Four analysts from the United States then respond.

 

The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 by Margret Kentgens-Craig

Although the Bauhaus existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula. After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. 

 

A Year After the BP Oil Spill, Uncertainty Reigns

Bob Gramling, author of Blowout in the Gulf, brings us up to speed on what has changed in the Gulf of Mexico in the year following the BP oil spill.

What has changed in the Gulf a year after the blowout of BP’s Macondo well is that the uncertainty along the northern Gulf of Mexico coast has continued to rise. 

Uncertainty about the ultimate, cumulative environmental effects is one that is seen a lot. The news has shown that an unprecedented number of baby dolphins have washed up on shore and there is much speculation, from various predictable camps, as to whether this phenomenon is due to BP oil or a cold winter. And if most of the oil is gone, as headlines told us, why do we still have thousands employed in "cleanup” activities?

Uncertainty about the future of traditional coastal occupations and businesses is everywhere. A fifth-generation shrimper in coastal Louisiana speculates as to whether he will be able to support his family this year, and whether the shrimp he may catch will be safe to eat. The owner of a motel in Orange Beach, Alabama wonders if tourist will show up this summer.

Uncertainty about promised compensation is found across the Gulf and in all walks of life. Ken Feinberg, a lawyer who is working for BP, is in charge of this process. He seems to spend most of his time trying to convince various groups—motel and restaurant owners, fishermen, souvenir sellers, local officials and almost anyone who lives in a coastal economy—that he really has their interests (as opposed to that of his employer) at heart, but few settlements are finalized. Oh, and by the way, he needs to double the amount his law firm is being compensated for his services. The rule is that if you can’t document it, then you didn’t lose it. Most of the commercial fisheries have long worked on a cash basis, so that’s gone. Ditto for tips for waitresses and bartenders. And various public agencies that appear to have received cash from BP with few questions asked seem to find increasingly stupid ways to spend it.

Uncertainty over whether the “new” regulatory regime will work and whether the offshore oil industry will get back to business as usual are both topics of conversation and speculation in the press. We changed the name of Minerals Management Service to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE—how do you pronounce that acronym? Maybe that’s the point), but it’s the same people with the same budget to do offshore inspections. Many down here in this economy so tied to offshore activity (there are over 3,500 rigs in the federal waters of the Gulf, most off Louisiana) argue that the moratorium has hurt them worse than the spill. Their supporters are frequently in print.

Finally, slowly, uncertainty about health is starting to appear. People who live by the beach, worked in the “cleanup,” fishermen who leased their boats to BP and futilely operated them as “vessels of opportunity” by putting out booms because the fishing season was closed last year, are finally starting to go to their doctors. Many are experiencing difficulty in breathing, weakness, memory loss, vision loss, and chronic headaches—and the results from the few that have been tested show up with various carcinogens associated with crude oil, such as benzene, in their blood at levels ten, twenty, and thirty times that found in the general population.

Uncertainty gnaws at people. It drags them down and there is so much of it a year after the BP oil spill.

In memoriam: Bill Freudenburg

We're deeply saddened to have to announce the death of our author William Freudenburg, who died on December 28 at his home in Santa Barbara after a long battle with cancer. He was 59.

Especially painful is the fact that only months ago we published Bill's first book with us: Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America. In the aftermath of the explosion of the BP well, Freudenburg and coauthor Robert Gramling - both well-known energy experts - quickly wrote up their diagnosis of the regulatory failures that led, almost inevitably, to the disaster, and added their prescription for a better and saner U.S. energy policy. We published the book quickly - and proudly. And we're deeply sorry that we won't get the opportunity to do more with Bill.

A public memorial service will be held January 22 at the University of California Santa Barbara, where Bill had taught since 2002. A public lecture that he gave about the oil spill about a month before his death is here. Much more about Bill - including a bio, stories, and pictures - is at a website set up by his family in his memory.

He will be missed.

PG&E: Good Work on Relocation Offer at Hinkley but what about the plight of residents on your fenceline in Daly City?

 

It is good news to hear that officials at the utility company, Pacific Gas and Electric, are finally talking with residents of Hinkley about offering to buy their homes so they can relocate to a safer area. The residents live over or near the plume of groundwater contaminated with Chromium 6, a toxic chemical used in the past at one of the utility's facilities,

 

This relocation offer should have been proffered decades ago when the spill and its devastating health impacts, so aptly chronicled in the movie "Erin Brokovich", first surfaced. But a late offer is better than none at all.

 

It would be even better news if PG&E officials learned from their experience in Hinkley and applied similar relocation measures in Daly City, CA, where residents of Midway Village, a public housing complex, live in housing that was constructed on top of soil contaminated long ago by one of the utility's neighboring facilities. At their Daly City facility, PG&E officials have maintained that the contaminated soil does not pose a danger to the health of residents even as they carried out a large-scale remedial soil removal program while residents were present at the housing complex. During this remediation residents were exposed to contaminated dust from the excavation, notes Bradley Angel, director of GeenAction, which was involved with a number of protests at the site.

 

Independent experts, such as Wilma Subra, a chemist who assists community residents who live adjacent to industrial contamination sites, disagree with PG&E officials who say it is safe to live at Midway Village. Subra is concerned that remediation efforts have not gone far enough; and that there are still contaminated soils beneath some of the public housing units and beneath paved walkways.

 

 In my book "Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States," I tell the story of how the residents of Midway Village came to realize they had a contamination problem, how they organized a protest, how they were treated by PG&E officials, and how they lost their lawsuit asking for relocation and compensation for health problems they feel were caused by the contamination.

 

 The book also points out that there are troubling disparities between the extent of remediation actions taken at Midway Village, where many residents are low-income African American and Latinos; and the measures taken in a similar situation in a upscale white community. In Midway Village the soil was not removed from beneath the housing units; in the more affluent community it was.  Similarly, residents at the Daly City housing complex were not moved out during the removal of contaminated soil, while residents at the more affluent community were temporarily relocated to a safe area.

 

In "Sacrifice Zones" I report on a number of instances around the nation where public housing complexes have been constructed immediately adjacent to heavily-polluting facilities. These badly located public housing complexes become toxic traps because residents are stuck in them, regardless of how egredious are the contamination problems, because they fear losing their berth in poublic housing if they complain. One of these dangerously located public housing complexes is located in Port Arthur, Texas, where the residents of Carver Terraces live across the fenceline from a giant Motiva refinery. This land-use configuration, where residential/industrial zoning permits families to live next door to heavy industry (something that would never be allowed in a middle class or affluent community), has predictable and tragic results. Fenceline residents are disproportionately exposed to toxic chemicals and suffer elevated levels of environmentally-induced disease and premature death.

 

PG&E officials should be congratulated for finally making a relocation offer in Hinkley. But they should also be urged to make relocation offers in Daly City and in other locations where their emissions cause dangers to neighboring residents.

 

Steve Lerner, author of "Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor;" and "Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States"

Happy Arbor Day

Founded over 135 years ago by J. Sterling Morton, today is the day we celebrate the planting and caring for trees.  His simple idea of setting aside a special day for tree planting is now more important than ever. As a special Arbor Day treat, we wanted to share a few of the stunning photographs from Barbara Bosworth's Trees: National Champions. 

Enjoy the photos and get out there and plant a tree.